Looking Back - 1993: The Year of the RIB
The Chinese may have their Year of the Horse, Rat, and other animals, but for Rugby Divers 1993 turned out to be very special and the Year of the RIB. How much can you remember?
The Club was still using the old Manta inflatable.
Inflatable trips went to St Abbs, Portland, Kimmeridge, Whitby and Bovisand. There was also a fantastic week on Lundy, the inflatable being taken over on the ferry as deck cargo. Hardboat weekends included Salcombe ("if this is a drift dive where's the current"), the Farnes (being done by Jerry even in those days), Inverkip on the Clyde and Weymouth.
The Manta was showing its age. On the Portland trip when its engine chose to die right in the middle of one of the entrances with the tide running. Fortunately help was at hand.
After much discussion the majority decision was to go for a new RIB and in May Delta offered us a RIB at a bargain price (£8,000 against £11,200 list price).
"We Got It" was the headline on a WB Special in September as news that an £8,000 grant application had been approved. Finally, after lots of hard work, November's WB proclaimed "It's arrived!". Yes, the RIB was here.
Social events were struggling. We had 68 members in February, yet only 19 attended the previous year's annual dinner, only 5 went ice-skating and the Christmas disco was cancelled after only 10 names were put down. More successful was a quiz night at the GEC club in Hillmorton Road which attracted 13 teams and raised £75.
A questionnaire was sent to all members to find out where they wanted the Club to be going and what they wanted from it and two 'open forums' held.
Renewing membership was £72.50.
February's WB included a serious article, Why Does Being In Water Make Divers Have To 'Go'? This even has a medical term, 'immersion diuresis' and is something to do with the 'P Phenonemon' and blood moving away from the legs. Yes, really!
1993 was also the year of the T-shirt. Yes, who can forget John Barton's arriving back from India with hundreds (I joke not) of Rugby Divers T-shirts. They were all white and all, it seemed, XXXL. They seemed to be on sale for years. We tried special offers, dying them, boiling them to make them shrink...
Two DVs 'disappeared' from the kit cupboard with no signs of a break in. They never were traced.
6 members did the Nautical Archaeological Society Part I course, held over one weekend 'in branch' at the Leisure Centre and Rugby School pool.
A 'Guess Who?' section in July's WB, a sort of forerunner of Mole, asked: Which Advanced Diver recently jumped off a boat and completed a dive to 25 metres without a weight belt? Two clues - it happened on the Salcombe trip and the individual is still a member. Who left a dry-suit hanging on a shower, then got up next morning to find it full to the zip? Who said "smooth black rubber, that's the way I like it!"?
In September the Committee took the decision to stop using the pool during the summer and on bank holiday Mondays.
WB really seemed to have it in for Advanced Divers as September's 'Guess Who?' asked: Which two recently did such a good buddy check that they failed to notice one hadn't got his air turned on? Then when they got to the bottom, they got all tangled up, one nearly lost his weight belt trying to put things right, and they finally had to surface tightly holding on to each other. These two are still members too!
Two special talks were given on Monday nights - Dorothy Knight on Marine Biology and Bill Leach on the work of the RNLI. Both were very well attended. An idea for the future?